Monday, June 19, 2017

Staunton, June 17 – Vladimir Putin’s
unexpected talk about the Internet and even “a digital Russia” is the latest
example of the old Russian tactic of erecting Potemkin villages to suggest
something that doesn’t exist to someone who needs to be convinced that it does,
according to Vladimir Pastukhov.

In this case, however, it isn’t the
tsar himself who needs to be persuaded of that but rather young people who are
put off by Putin’s own conservative back to the past and who are thus in play
for the upcoming presidential elections and need to be catered to at least at
the symbolic level, the St. Antony’s scholar says (republic.ru/posts/84030).

The
discovery that in post-“Crimea is Ours” Russia there is such a group, Pastukhov
says, has forced Putin “out of his political comfort zone,” the place where he
can occupy himself with the preservation of all that he wants to preserve from
the Soviet past, and compelled him to look to a future which in the nature of
things does not have a place for like the leader he has been.

As
a result, he or more precisely his political technologists are trying to
present him as something that he is not, someone focused on the future rather
than the past and who can thus win over the young without in fact taking any
steps that would cost him his base in the conservative majority he now is
supported by.

That
the Putin who speaks about a digital Russia is an invention is something about
which there can be no doubt: when Dmitry Medvedev was president, his spokesman
noted that Putin didn’t use the Internet or social networks and didn’t even see
any particular value in them for himself or others.

Now,
however, Putin’s associates are suggesting that he has been “reborn” as a
digital-savvy leader.But it doesn’t
require much thought to recognize that this is all about the upcoming election
rather than a real change of heart, the UK Russian historian and commentator argues.

According
to Pastukhov, “Putin, in contrast to Medvedev, as before remains completely
indifferent to gadgets and all their offspring and the main reason she has
suddenly begun to talk about them is the return of the theme of the future in
discussions of the Russian political agenda.”

“The
future,” he says, “is ceasing to be a distant abstraction; and this if you will
is the main distinction of the upcoming electoral cycle from the previous one.
Putin is only seeking to bring himself into line with political circumstances
that have unexpectedly changed” and to create “an illusion” that he is a man of
the future as well.

But
in fact, the analyst says, “nostalgia for the past and fear of the future were
and remain up to now the main reasons why Russian society resigns itself to any
small or large sins committed by the Russian powers that be, including greed
and corruption.After all, we have seen
still worse times.”

That
was fine as a political strategy as long as most people remembered Soviet
times, but now there is a younger generation for which “the Soviet past is just
as distant an abstraction as fearing for the future is for ‘Putin’s support
group.’”And that younger group is, even
after Crimea, one that political leaders must find a way to attract and win
over.

The
conservative even archaic language Putin has used up to now won’t work and so
Putin is presenting himself as a new digital leader, even though the notion of
a digital Russia will be just another “Potemkin façade of the real Russia,”
Pastukhov suggests. The problem, of course, is that “there is no place” for
this statistical place in Russia today.

“Present-day
technologies are incompatible with the archaic structure of Russian power, with
its unlimited legal nihilism, with its greedy ‘family’ monopolies, with its legalized
corruption and all-permissive ‘criminal matrix,’ and which has force structures
that are not under anyone’s control, including that of Putin himself.

But
even that is “not the main thing,” Pastukhov says.Rather it is this: the more Putin promotes
the idea of a digital Russia, the more obvious he makes himself an anachronism
that can be seen by all. That limits how far he can go in using this tactic,
but because it will soon be obvious that it is only a tactic, that too will
have some negative consequences for his future.